‘What is it, lass?’ He had smoothed her thick bob of chestnut hair with a massive but infinitely gentle hand. ‘Aren’t you happy here? It’s a grand house, and I’m sure your aunt does her best for you.’
‘I don’t want her best.’ Marty had wound her arms round his neck. ‘I want you, Uncle Jim.’
He was very silent for a long time, then he said quietly, ‘So be it, Tina. I can’t take you with me now, because I don’t know where I’m bound for and that’s no life for a child. But one day, my chick, I’ll find a place to settle down in and then I’ll send for you—just as I’d meant . . .’ He’d stopped then, but Marty had known with an odd instinct that he’d been going to say, ‘just as I’d meant to send for your mother’, and she thought rather sadly that maybe if he’d just taken her with him four years earlier, her mother might still be alive and happy. And it didn’t matter that he’d called her Tina either, because she knew that in some strange way in Uncle Jim’s eyes, she and her mother were the same person.
He’d gone then, after drinking his tea and wishing Miss Barton ‘Good afternoon’ with more civility than sincerity, and Marty had not seen him again. Occasionally there had been a letter, and even more rarely a parcel, but none of them ever contained the hoped-for summons, and after a while the demands of school had begun to blur his image in her mind, and when she thought of him at all it was in the terms of a childhood fantasy.
A young woman emerged from the café to take her order and Marty asked her for an Orangina. Her throat was parched from the dust and heat of travelling. She was hungry too, and when she glanced through the beaded curtain that hung over the open doorway she saw that the adjoining room to the bar was a restaurant, and that there were menus posted on a small board at the side. She felt in her handbag for her wallet and counted her remaining francs. She had enough for a meal, if it wasn’t too expensive, and then she would set about finding her way to Uncle Jim’s house. Les Sables des Pins didn’t look a very big town, and she was sure she would have little difficulty in finding her way to Solitaire, as he’d told her it was called.
She got out his creased and much folded letter and read it again. It was not the letter of a man who had ever had much to do with words, but it was hardly the illiterate scrawl that Aunt Mary had derisively dismissed it as.
It had not been a long letter either, but it told Marty all that was necessary.
‘After all these years,’ he’d written. ‘I’ve finally found a place I can call home, and it’s yours too, Tina, if you still want it. I’ve no relative other than you in the world, so everything I have—the flower farm and the house—will be yours when I’ve gone. It’s very beautiful here in the spring, Tina, when the bulbs have bloomed, and each year in April there’s a flower festival in Les Sables des Pins. That’s the nearest town, and it’s just as it sounds with acres of pine forests running down to the longest beach you’ve ever seen. My house is by itself in the forest—I suppose that’s why the chap that built it called it Solitaire. A bit of a fancy name, but I like it, and I hope that you will too.’
He had enclosed a small coloured snapshot of the house, and as Marty studied it she felt her spirits rise perceptibly. Who couldn’t be cheered by the prospect of going to live in a long, low house, its red-tiled roof, and dark green shutters providing a dramatic contrast to the stark white of the exterior?
There was a man standing near the front door and at first glance she had assumed it was Uncle Jim, but when she looked more closely she saw that he was a much younger man, taller than Uncle Jim, and with dark almost black hair where Jim’s was fair turning to grey. Or had been when she saw him last. He was probably completely grey by now.
She’d looked through the letter, stirred by a vague inexplicable curiosity about the man in the photograph, but there had been no clue to his identity.
Marty drank her Orangina gratefully when it came, and then bestirred herself to look at the menu. As usual there was a choice of meals at various prices, and after some wistful lingering over the menus that offered grilled shrimps and moules marinières as starters, she decided to settle for the plat du jour—a thick slice of rare roast beef, accompanied by a steaming dish of pommes frites, and preceded by a delicious home-made terrine with a side-dish of tomato salad in an aromatic dressing.
In spite of some inner qualms of nervousness at the prospect of meeting Uncle Jim again after all these years her healthy young appetite would not be denied, and she sat back at last with a sigh of repletion, blinking her eyes sleepily in the sun as she drank her coffee and toyed with one of the nectarines that had been served as a dessert.
If the worst came to the worst, she told herself, and Uncle Jim had not received her letter in reply, telling him that she was on her way, or even if he was away, she had enough money to supply her with a night’s lodging here in Les Sables, or even two nights if it came to the pinch. There had been a generous amount of francs enclosed in Uncle Jim’s letter, and she had converted her own small savings into travellers cheques as well.
It was probably this more than anything, she thought, that had convinced Aunt Mary that she was really going to France.
‘You’ve closed your savings account?’ Her aunt had stared at her as if she had gone mad. ‘What on earth has possessed you, child? You surely haven’t been taken in by the boasts of that ridiculous old vagabond? You’ve no idea what kind of conditions he may be living in. He probably wants an unpaid housekeeper to look after him. A Frenchwoman would drive too hard a bargain for him, so he’s thought of you, after all these years without a word.’
Marty bit her lip, willing herself to be silent, while she flinched at the scathing nature of her aunt’s remarks. She had always known that Aunt Mary would not be pleased to hear of her plans, but she had not expected quite such a vitriolic reaction. And she could have replied hotly that she was little more than an unpaid housekeeper living where she was, Aunt Mary having dispensed with the daily woman she had employed for some years on economic grounds, leaving the bulk of the heavy work to Marty at weekends.
Aunt Mary was going on. ‘You’ll make the biggest mistake of your life, my child, if you throw up everything here. Your mother did exactly the same thing, and look what a disaster that was—marrying a man of that class, and then being widowed, left with a young child to bring up. I would have thought the example of her folly would have taught you a thing or two.’
‘And so it has,’ Marty said hotly, unable to restrain her anger any more at this slur on her mother. ‘It taught me that it’s love that matters in this world, and even you can’t deny that my mother and father were happy together. And Uncle Jim loves me, so even if this house in France is—a slum, I don’t care.’
‘I think you will.’ Aunt Mary’s lips were so tightly compressed that they had almost vanished. ‘You are used to certain standards, my dear—standards that your father’s family, good people though they may be, probably don’t even know exist. And what kind of a life has Jim Langton been leading all these years? Heaven only knows, but it’s doubtful whether he’s ever been fit company for a young girl, especially someone with your upbringing. And you seriously intend to throw it all up and go to live in a country—where it’s not even safe to drink out of the taps,’ she added on a note of pure bathos.
Angry as she was, Marty could not help seeing the funny side of it all and a reluctant smile started to spread, but Aunt Mary had no sense of humour, and she reached forward and to Marty’s shock slapped her hard across her face.
‘This is no laughing matter,’ she rapped, her own face alarmingly red. ‘Understand this, if you leave here, if you go to that no-good tramp of a man, then I shall alter my will. Not a penny will you get, nor this house. And don’t imagine